Gimba Kakanda@gimbakakanda
What Non-Law Students Miss About Law Modules
We can dismantle the superiority complex of any profession without trivialising its qualifying process. Those of you citing your A grades in law modules taken as electives, or in law-related modules taken from another faculty, to prove that Law is an easier discipline are probably doing so out of blissful ignorance. The law modules taken as electives, or as service courses outside the Faculty of Law, are watered-down versions of what is taught to Law students. I know this because I have experienced both.
When I applied to study Law as a direct-entry student, I tendered a transcript containing modules such as Nigerian Legal System, which are mandatory for the study of Law, and sought waivers because I had A grades in all the law modules I had taken as a Political Science student. That application was rejected. The reason given was that the content of the law modules I took in my non-law degree was an intentionally diluted version, and that I could not have been assessed as I would have been if I were a Law student.
It took me just one semester to understand the difference. The same modules I had taken were not of similar academic demand, even though, for instance, my Nigerian Legal System lecturer was a retired High Court judge who had recently served as Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice. He was uncompromisingly strict, to the point of boasting that none of us would secure an A grade in his module. I think only two of us in a class of over 60 achieved it.
Yes, he was strict in teaching non-law students, but the requirement to master specific cases, statutes and various legal principles in a non-law degree was not of the same measure as what I would later experience in the Faculty of Law. It then made sense that the Law Faculty had rejected my application. If I had not gone back for an LL.B. programme, I would probably have subscribed to the mindset that, having secured A grades in law modules as a Political Science student, I possessed the same mastery of those modules as Law students.
So, these Commercial Law, Taxation Law, Company Law, and Law of Contract modules you took as non-law students, and now cite as proof that law modules were easy, are not of the same intensity as what is taught in the Faculty of Law. The academic demands are not similar either, and I say this with experiential authority.
Law is demanding, academically and professionally. But I also think it is ridiculous to persist in bragging that a particular discipline is tougher than others when you have not functioned in that other discipline. No degree should be measured by the scale of suffering it took to achieve it. Most of the comparisons trending on social media are projections of professional bias and arrogance, and they are largely baseless.
If you judge a devoted medical doctor by his knowledge of astronomy, you are going to be disappointed, just as you would be if you judge an economist by his understanding of applied law. Every discipline is relevant in its own way, and outside it, its practitioners are bound to falter or stutter.
A lawyer may develop expertise in health law, but that does not confer deeper knowledge of medical procedures than a medical doctor possesses. By the same token, accountants cannot claim greater mastery of taxation law, with its attendant cases, statutes, and interlocking principles, than lawyers, who bring a broader, more nuanced, and more rigorously tested understanding of law and its overlapping doctrines, extending well beyond any single sub-field.